Tragic Toll After Chaos on Mountain

Pakistani army paramedics helped Marco Confortola, an Italian climber, upon his arrival at a military hospital after he was rescued from K-2's base camp on Wednesday.Credit
Muhammad Abbas/Associated Press

For two months, dozens of mountaineers had huddled at camps below the peak, acclimating to the thin air, practicing their ascent and waiting, waiting, for the moment.

The final push began in the dark hours after midnight on Aug. 1. Members of at least five expeditions — and perhaps as many as nine — began the last leg of their climb to conquer Mount Everest’s slightly shorter but far more dangerous sister, K2, its peak towering, glistening and pyramidlike above them, laden with snow from recent storms.

Gerard McDonnell, 37, an Irish engineer climbing with a Dutch team, wrote on his blog when the start date was set: “Let luck and good fortune prevail!!! Fingers crossed.”

But luck did not hold. On the way up the last 2,000 feet, a Serbian climber fell to his death, and a Pakistani porter died trying to recover his body. And on the way back, a chunk of glacier splintered and came crashing down, sweeping at least four climbers on ropes to their deaths and leaving a handful of others trapped in the death zone above 26,000 feet — desperately cold, starved for oxygen and without ropes.

Bulletins posted on the Dutch expedition’s Web site charted the unfolding tragedy: “Gerard McDonnell: status unknown. We have not heard or seen anything from Gerard.”

On Tuesday, the climber likely to be the last of the survivors, an Italian, Marco Confortola, staggered on frostbite-blackened feet to the base camp, for a time refusing help and oxygen, preferring to make his own way down.

“I understand that many died, and that only a few made it down,” he said by telephone, in a conversation reported by an Italian scientific official, as he waited for a Pakistani military rescue helicopter to pluck him from the unforgiving mountainside. “I am happy that I was one of them.” He was airlifted to a nearby town Wednesday morning for medical treatment, Reuters reported.

In all, 11 lives were lost in the worst episode on K2 since 13 climbers died over a two-week span in 1986, and one of the worst disasters in mountaineering history.

In the aftermath, criticism has swirled about poor preparations and delays caused by climbers laying ropes improperly in the Bottleneck, the precipitous climb just below the summit.

There were questions, too, about whether the attempt to reclaim a fallen climber was too costly and whether some climbers failed to turn back when it was clear that they would not make it back in daylight. The presence of hired high-altitude porters on some of the teams raised questions about whether some of the expeditions might have been commercial, guided efforts with incompletely prepared climbers — reminiscent of the disastrous 1996 Everest climb that claimed eight lives.

Yet to most, the deaths were simply the latest on a notoriously dangerous mountain — known as the mountaineer’s mountain — on which many climbers have lost their lives since it was first conquered in 1954.

K2 is known as the world’s hardest and most dangerous mountain for climbers, more challenging even than Everest. Farther north and 1,500 miles from Everest, it collects heavy snow and storms, and climbers have only a few days each year when they can try for the peak, usually in early August. “For a professional, seasoned mountaineer it’s more of the holy grail than Everest,” said the veteran American climber Ed Viesturs. “There is no easy way to climb K2.”

In a message sent back to friends, three South Koreans from the Flying Jump K2 Expedition expressed their awe about “the mountain of the mountains” and “the mountain that invites death.”

Last Friday morning, the “weather was perfect,” said Nicholas Rice, an American from Los Angeles, who would later turn back before the Bottleneck because of frostbite. He ended up recording, on blog posts, much of what is known about what went wrong, who died when, and why.

The various expeditions — with members from several countries, including South Korea, the Netherlands, Norway, Serbia, Italy, the United States and France — set off from Camp 4, the last camp before the summit, between midnight and 3 a.m., Mr. Rice said. No one is certain exactly how many climbers were there, because no one coordinates the expeditions. Many other details remain unclear.

To reach the summit, it is necessary to climb the Bottleneck, then traverse left under the glacier’s giant overhanging brow.

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The first fatality came early, when Dren Mandic, a Serb, fell to his death in the Bottleneck, followed by the Pakistani porter, Jehan Baig.

But some of those who waited to try to rescue them decided eventually to press on, despite the loss and the delay. Some of the climbers did not reach the summit until around 8 p.m. — some 16 hours after they had set off, a terrifying expanse of time in temperatures far below zero, with so little oxygen to feed minds and muscles.

Whatever triumph there might have been, it was soon swept away. Just a few hundred yards below the summit, as climbers were descending on the fixed ropes down the Bottleneck, an ice ledge above them snapped.

“They would not have seen it coming,” said Pat Falvey, a mountain climber and a friend of Mr. McDonnell’s who was coordinating updates of the disaster from Ireland on the Internet.

A Dutch climber, Wilco van Rooijen, described the chaos that took place then. Speaking from a hospital bed on Monday in the northern Pakistani town of Skardu, he told Reuters, “Everybody was fighting for himself and I still do not understand why everybody were leaving each other.”

“People were running down, but didn’t know where to go, so a lot of people were lost on the mountain on the wrong side, wrong route, and then you have a big problem,” he said.

The falling ice had swept away the ropes used to navigate the Bottleneck, and as night fell and the temperature plummeted, the climbers struggled with an awful choice: wait for rescue in the death zone, or descend without fixed ropes. Temperatures at the top of K2 overnight can reach minus 40 degrees, Mr. Rice said.

Early on Saturday morning a group of five climbers were spotted by observers at a lower camp; they seemed to have made the decision to descend, Mr. Falvey said in a telephone interview. “They stepped out onto the section, and they fell,” he said.

Mr. van Rooijen made it down the mountain without ropes and, according to Mr. Falvey, he was spotted on Sunday from one of the lower camps, a lone climber wearing an orange jacket emerging from the wilderness.

He had apparently strayed from the route where the returning mountaineers were expected, called Abruzzi, and instead was descending on the Cessen Route down K2.

Mountaineering experts said some of those missing could still be alive, though it was unlikely. So on Tuesday, it seemed, Mr. Confortola, the Italian climber, was probably the last survivor to be given up by the mountain.

Seemingly still in shock from his ordeal, Mr. Confortola gave a sketchy recollection of the events, inevitably full of questions about what happened and what went wrong.

He said his own group lost time before reaching the summit at 7 p.m. on Friday, because they did not have the right equipment.

“I think we arrived late on the summit of K2 because the technical equipment was low quality,” he was quoted as saying by the Italian news agency ANSA.

He said he had tried to help some of his fellow climbers but had also endangered himself. “To try to help, to save the others, I froze my feet and hands,” he told the Italian news channel Sky TG24. “But instinct makes you want to save them, and for me that’s a good thing.”

Meanwhile, people on mountaineering Web sites were paying their respects to those climbers, like Mr. McDonnell, who were still missing and presumed dead.